The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Referring now to FIG. 1, an image capture system 10 includes a lens assembly 12 that directs incident light onto a sensor module 14. The image capture system 10 may capture still images and/or video. The lens assembly 12 directs light from a scene image (hereinafter “scene”) onto an image sensor 16 of the sensor module 14. The image sensor 16 may include a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel sensor. The image sensor 16 includes an integrated circuit having a pixel array. Each pixel includes a photo-detector that produces a signal based on an intensity of the incident light received by that pixel.
A color filter array (CFA) 18 (e.g., a Bayer filter array) is arranged between the lens assembly 12 and the pixel array. The CFA 18 includes color filters that pass red, green, or blue light. The CFA 18 typically includes two green color filters for each red and blue color filter. Each of the pixels of the image sensor 16 corresponds to a single color of the CFA 18. Accordingly, pixels corresponding to red, green, or blue filters detect an intensity of red, green, or blue light, respectively. The sensor module 14 reads out signals from the image sensor 16. Digital values corresponding to signals read out from the image sensor 16 may be referred to as “RAW data.”
An image processing module 34 implements an image processing pipeline that processes the RAW data for output to a device. For example, the processed RAW data may be output to a display device and/or a storage device 36.